Two months after his return to England, in May 1783, Beckford married Lady Margaret Gordon, daughter of the Earl of Aboyne. It seemed to his mother and family that the spell had been broken, that his delinquent years had ended at last. They were greatly relieved. Not only was Lady Margaret of acceptable aristocratic pedigree (something that always weighed heavily with the Begum), but she was pretty, sensible and determined, all the qualities that the Hamiltons would wish for in a mistress of Fonthill. The next year was one of peace. Louisa and Courtenay seemed to be banished; the newly wedded couple went to Switzerland which had so inspired Beckford on his earlier visit. They were warmly received in the local community. When they returned to England in March 1784, Beckford took his seat in the House of Commons as the Member for Wells. All seemed set for the public career that his parents had always hoped he would follow.
It was not to be: it seemed that the doomed character of Caliph Vathek had been transposed into the life of its creator. On a visit to the Courtenays at Powderham Castle in September of the same year, Beckford was accused of having been seen by the family tutor in flagrante delicto with William Courtenay, now aged sixteen. Had the matter been kept within the family, it would probably have done little harm. As it was, Lord Loughborough,3 head of the Powderham household and political enemy of Beckford’s guardians, Chatham and Lord Chancellor Thurlow, made it his business to see that the ‘story’ gained wide publicity in the London press. Loughborough’s political motives may have been reinforced by a strong dislike of the effete and languid character of Beckford; at any rate he succeeded in creating what has subsequently been called the Powderham scandal’ which certainly cost Beckford his peerage and had a profound effect on the course of his life. Against his better judgement, Beckford followed family advice to go abroad. With his young wife and infant daughter, he made for Switzerland in the summer of 1785.
His troubles, however, were not ended. The following year, 1786, proved to be the worst of his life. In May, after a difficult childbirth, his second daughter, Susan Euphemia was born. Two weeks later Lady Margaret died. The death of his wife, with whom he was deeply in love and who had remained calmly loyal throughout the traumatic period following the Powderham scandal, was a bitter blow. It left him in complete isolation, away from home and no longer supported by the stable relationship that had made all his difficulties bearable. However, this was not the end of his misfortunes: at the end of the year, and explicitly against his wishes, the Reverend Samuel Henley published an English version of Vathek in London, suggesting that it was little more than the translation of an Arabic original. Beckford was obliged to respond with a French edition, scrambled together quickly and published at Lausanne in December.1.
These catastrophic happenings might well have broken the spirit of the most resolute man. In two short years Beckford saw his social aspirations shattered, his beloved wife dead, and his major literary work produced in a form of which he did not approve. England had indeed become his Eblis; to escape the curse that seemed to hang over him he travelled abroad for the most part of the next twelve years. He visited Savoy and Switzerland, rattling around the countryside in his dormeuse with a retinue of servants and hangers-on, but it was in Paris that he lingered for months at a time. There he could indulge his collector’s appetite, finding that the uncertainty of life in revolutionary France encouraged people to sell cheaply. He collected paintings, objets d’art and rare books which he had shipped back to Fonthill, staying until the very last possible moment in 1793 when war had been declared against England. However, of all his travels, it was his sojourns in Portugal, lasting almost four years, that were the richest in terms of personal experience and the development of his artistic talents.
Although Beckford arrived in Lisbon in 1787 whilst still mourning the death of his wife, his ambition to re-establish himself in English society motivated him to make the most of his newly acquired connections at the Portuguese court. He thought that gaining recognition by a foreign sovereign would repair some of the damage done by the Powderham scandal and help to begin the process of rehabilitation at home. He therefore set about the business of getting presented to the Queen, Maria I, finding a well-placed and doughty supporter in the person of Dom Diogo, Fifth Marquis of Marialva, Master of the Queen’s Horse, who had befriended him soon after his arrival.2 The presentation was firmly opposed by the British envoy, the Hon. Robert Walpole,1 whose participation was deemed essential by the Portuguese Crown. It is not clear why Walpole took such an intransigent line. It may be that, as in the case of Lord Loughborough, he conceived a dislike of Beckford’s character which, outwardly, showed traces of arrogance and condescension. He was also probably envious of Beckford’s wealth.2 Rumblings of the affair are felt in Beckford’s private diary, the Journal, which he kept throughout the summer and which was not intended for publication.
Not all of Beckford’s time in Lisbon was so frustrating. He plunged with enthusiasm into the heady social life of the Marialvas and their aristocratic set, attending endless series of lunches, dinners, and excursions to the theatre. He also made a great deal of the church life of Lisbon, enjoying the pageantry and feigned piousness of a decadent, exuberant Catholicism, as well as the fine music that was part of it. If he were not present at some formal evening engagement, he would be at the opera or listening to music at the Patriarchal Seminary or in one of the many Lisbon churches.3 These social occasions, often glittering and impressive, and in which Beckford is seen cavorting with the highest members of Portuguese society, are amusingly portrayed in the Sketches, a work which he did write for publication but which only saw the light of day in 1834.
The visit of 1787 was to prove significant in other ways as well. Beckford’s attention was first focused on Dom Pedro de Marialva, the Marquis’ fifteen-year-old son, but soon he was infatuated with another youth, Gregorio Franchi, a young seminarian at the Patriarchal School whose dashing good looks, vivacious personality and musical talent were an intoxicating mix he found impossible to resist. Beckford’s relationship with Franchi was to prove lasting; indeed their friendship, with its homosexual aspect, was the most intimate of his entire life. The excitement of these amorous encounters provides a racy undercurrent to the Journal.
A less emotionally charged tone is found in the one surviving account of his 1794 visit to Portugal when he took time off to make his excursion to the monasteries of Alcobaça and Batalha. On this visit Beckford was at last presented, albeit to the Prince Regent who reigned in place of his deranged mother. But time had taken its toll: by now the English visitor was altogether a more mature, even cynical cosmopolitan. Much though he loved Arcadian Sintra and though, as we know from correspondence between him and Marialva, a Portuguese title was on offer,4 he had lost the urge to take up what would have been a comfortable as well as a courtly life. When forced to a decision, he could not exile himself from the Fonthill that he still loved. Indeed both the Gothic buildings he saw and the landscaping that he did in Portugal . made Beckford keen to return home to start new schemes for building and redesigning the grounds of his estate.1 Nevertheless, the Recollections, which he did not publish until his old age, is a very spirited work, full of joie de vivre and of zest. Later Beckford came to see it as a last expression of a youthful sense of fun at a carefree, happy time of his life.
In the last years of the century, Beckford still harboured political ambitions, either to act as a mediator between England and France or to be English Ambassador to Portugal. However, his advances were disdainfully dismissed by Pitt, now at the pinnacle of his career and an implacable enemy of a man he regarded as effete and outcast. Beckford took his revenge with his pen – the mildly critical tone of Modern Novel Writing turns to overt hostility in Azemia where Pitt is satirized as a trickster who has led his people into a condition not much above slavery. Lashing out furiously at Pitt may have done something to assuage the inner pain and depression at what seemed his total rejection by the highest ranks of English society.2
Although he became a familiar figure on horseback around the Bath countryside, his existence became more and more solitary, even reclusive. He continued to read avidly and to annotate his books. In the 1830s he enjoyed a literary revival when he published his ‘Portuguese’ works. But his literary talent was now parasitic on earlier experience; only in the lamenting tones of his vast correspondence do we get any feeling of the desperation that haunted him.1 His energy went into collecting, landscaping and improving his house, as well as furnishing his tower overlooking the city. As his hopes and dreams faded into a sometimes bitter nostalgia, leaving him emotionally desiccated, it seemed that the muse too had all but deserted him.
2. ORIENTAL TALES
We have seen that from his earliest years that Beckford loved books and spent hours browsing in the Alderman’s ample library at Splendens. Inspired by exotic and chivalrous tales and accounts of voyages to distant places, he began to create an imaginative world of heroes and demons, castles, towers and caves with labyrinthine passages leading to the centre of the earth. These images, swirling in his mind, were soon to be set down in writing. While some of his imaginings were of mediaeval knights in armour and the mysterious, early history of England, he was also encouraged by his contact with Cozens and his love of the Arabian Nights to try his own hand at the oriental tale. We shall see that in Beckford’s hands it took a distinct and unusual twist and his emotional plots were, in the way of most young writers’ outpourings, distinctly autobiographical in tone.
Beckford was already writing stories in his teens – by his seventeenth year he had produced a number of short works, including L’Esplendente, an eastern tale of which only a fragment survives.2 The hero of this tale is a young Mohammedan boy who is punished by his father for drawing figures in the human form, something proscribed by his religion. The drawings are torn to pieces by his angry parent and scattered to the winds while the youth, distraught by the destruction of his creative work, turns away in grief. However, grief is not the only passion that he experiences. He feels guilty at having raised his father’s wrath but angry too because he cannot understand what sin he has committed or why his parent’s reaction is so violent. Like young William pursuing his reading of eastern lore, the hero of the story is genuinely perplexed and hurt by his parent’s hostility to his favourite and, in his eyes, innocent pursuit. His instinct to rebel, hitherto dormant, is brought to the fore.
The oriental theme of L’Esplendente is echoed in another story which Beckford wrote before he was eighteen. He called it the Long Story but when it was finally published in 1930, Guy Chapman entitled it The Vision and it forms the first extract of our selection of texts. The Vision describes the adventures of a young hero, who, driven by an irrepressible curiosity,3leaves his family and friends to make a lonely journey through bleak mountainous terrain on a cloudless, moonlit night. He finds himself exposed to frightening dangers on all sides – the path he has to take over cliffs passes above ravines and precipitous drops. The landscape is dauntingly lunar; a melancholy air hangs over his mission, the purpose of which is unclear. On the darkened plateau that he is obliged to cross alone, reptilian creatures slink and squirm and all manner of unidentifiable figures lurk in the shadows. Through these nastinesses the hero has to crawl until he finds himself at the entrance of a great cave where he sees two shadowy figures, one the sage-like Moisasour, clutching a rod of gold; the other the emerald-eyed Nouronihar, an Indian princess of exquisite mien. Undaunted by his experiences, our hero enters a Faustian pact with the two spirits: he agrees to endure further suffering and certain unspecified rites of initiation in return for a taste of true knowledge and a glimpse of an ideal existence unknown to any other European. The next stage of the adventure unfolds.
The images that follow, now describing the hero’s progress in the underground labyrinth of Dantesque-like circles, are surreal and dreamlike. Led by two luminous spirits, Malich and Terminga, the young adventurer descends into subterranean passages that open up a world of grottos, underground lakes and caverns with crystal stalagmites and stalactites, exotic vegetation and scenery. He beholds frightful scenes in which weird, deformed figures crush the skulls of human beings and wear out a mournful existence in dank, murky chambers. Surviving further ordeals of fire and water, he is at last judged to have triumphed over all adversity and is rewarded by being admitted to the secret pleasure gardens of the Brahmin Moisasour and the wise and beautiful Nouronihar, there to enjoy the sensual luxuries of an earthly paradise where sybaritic living is mingled with strict observance of religious rituals.1
The Vision is certainly the product of a young pen. Nevertheless, despite its direct, unrelenting and highly serious tone, it shows considerable sophistication in story telling and reveals a prose style in which nuance and rhythm are superbly handled. The young author is particularly clever at maintaining suspense which he achieves by withholding information that puzzles the reader, for example about the exact purpose of William’s journey. Instead of pondering on the hero’s reason for leaving his family and friends, the reader is projected into the opening scene with minimal preparation, heightening his sense of the immediacy of the hero’s plight. Although the plot is simple, even stark, it has its own momentum; there is no time to linger or dally by the way. These literary ploys maximize the drama of the situation and enable Beckford to sweep his reader along from one image to another, never losing control of the swift pace of his narrative. For all its naivety – written in the first person, a ‘William’ ejaculates onto the page when the hero is accused of an unknown crime – The Vision is a skilful exercise in story telling and it shows Beckford’s concern with the theme of the damnation, whether the impious seeker of knowledge is a Wiltshire gentleman or a caliph.
The oriental ‘wrapper’ in which Beckford presented his first ‘long’ story, was much in vogue throughout the eighteenth century. In France the oriental tale had always served the satirical purpose of mocking society and its institutions and debunking all that was held precious by the political elite whilst in England it was more distinctly part of the crusade to reform morals that permeated Augustan literature and journalism.1 In 1721 Montesquieu had adopted an eastern motif in his Lettres Persanes, using his exotic foreigners to criticize French society. His intention was to be polemical as well as to make observations about the human passions in the heterodox tradition of moraliste writing. Only incidentally was he concerned with the louche details of life in a Persian harem. His use of the oriental motif was echoed in Voltaire whose eastern tales, such as Mahomet (1742) and Zadig (1748), achieved wide popularity.
Meanwhile the oriental figure was becoming familiar to English readers through his appearance in issues of the immensely successful Tatler and Spectator of Addison and Steele. Here the purpose was strict moralizing: if foreig
ners could be used to show up weaknesses in English society, they were also a means of trumpeting its advantages. The benefits of ‘polite’ living, of which the periodical essayists were so convinced, could be emphasized by being contrasted to the far less comfortable existence of the subjects of despotic, Eastern rulers. Committed to these civilized, English benefits, yet plagued by inner doubts, Dr Johnson was later to set his lament on the illusion of human happiness in distant Abyssinia, though the baneful message of Rasselas (1759) applies to men everywhere. A similar ambiguity sounds in the exchanges between the Chinese visitor and his English hosts in his friend, Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762) where the comparison of customs and manners is undertaken with a delicate sense of irony and good humour. Sometimes the use of oriental imagery is blatantly secondary to another theme: in John Hawkesworth’s Almoran and Hamet (1761) it is blended into a romantic plot; in Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764) it is added as mere spice. Rarely did the interest of English writers in Eastern culture run very deep.
In Beckford’s hands the oriental tale, backed by a more thorough knowledge of Eastern languages and literature than had been possessed by the majority of his predecessors, (which he dextrously reminds us of by commenting on the fairness of spoken Persian in The Vision), was being used in a different, more subversive way.2 We begin to realize that through the rich texture of oriental imagery, more accurately observed in its detail than hitherto, Beckford was in fact exploring deeply emotional themes and was casting into dramatic form his feeling of rebellion against the adult world of respectability and convention. We shall see that this same technique, of importing a new, Romantic sensibility into an established literary form, appears in his travel writing where we often feel the spiritual and aesthetic superimposed upon the detailed, physical landscapes or scenes that he might be describing. Subliminal wanderings in the realm of mystery and imagination, graphically set out with visual immediacy in The Vision, are the beginning of his Romantic quest for the unattainable.
Vathek and Other Stories Page 2
